Towards sustainable development in China: do political rights and civil liberties matter for environmental quality?
- PDF / 462,172 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 57 Downloads / 155 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Towards sustainable development in China: do political rights and civil liberties matter for environmental quality? Emrah Koçak 1
&
Oktay Kızılkaya 2
Received: 7 March 2020 / Accepted: 18 June 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract China is a rising power of the twenty-first century with its brilliant economic performance as a result of the transition to the free market economy model. However, China’s economic development process has caused high environmental costs. For the past decade, China has been the leading country responsible for global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). Therefore, determining the dynamics that have a reducing effect on CO2 emissions in China is very important for the development of sustainable environmental policies. This paper aims to examine the impacts of the institutional structure on environmental sustainability in China. To this end, the study follows the method of cointegration with multiple breaks that produce robust econometric results and consider structural changes. According to the results, (i) the validity of an N-shaped EKC relationship is supported between economic growth and environmental pollution. (ii) Industrialization and trade have an increasing impact on environmental pollution. (iii) Political rights and civil liberties have a reducing effect on environmental pollution. Consequently, this study implies that political rights and civil liberties can make an important contribution to achieving sustainability goals in China. Keywords Sustainability . Political rights . Civil liberties . Carbon dioxide (CO2) . Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) . China
Introduction Global warming is one of the most critical problems of the twenty-first century that directly affects our economy, social life, health, policies, and lifestyle (Hasegawa et al. 2016; Lu and Lu 2019; Zhang et al. 2019). The decrease in amounts of snow and ice, the rise in sea level, and the increase in average temperatures are evidence of climate change observed in the last 50 years (IPCC 2014). There is a strong consensus in academic and political circles that the source of this problem is the rapid increase in human-induced greenhouse gas
Responsible Editor: Lotfi Aleya * Emrah Koçak [email protected] Oktay Kızılkaya [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, Erciyes University, 38039 Melikgazi, Kayseri, Turkey
2
Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, Kırşehir Ahi Evran University, 40100 Kirsehir, Turkey
emissions/carbon dioxide (Ur Rahman et al. 2019; Bai et al. 2019; Mele and Randazzo 2019). Industrialization, urbanization, trade, transportation, and energy demand, which are the result of the development of the modern economy is the main dynamics of the increase in greenhouse gases, especially CO2 (Koçak and Ulucak 2019; Mamipour et al. 2019; Danish et al. 2019; Farhani and Balsalobre-Lorente 2020). As of today, however, the process of economic de
Data Loading...
